AS level Philosophy AQA

AS level Philosophy AQA

Dates Available

• Week 1: Monday 27 March – Friday 31 March
• Week 2: Monday 3 April – Friday 7 April (including Good Friday)
• Week 3: Monday 10 April – Friday 14 April (including Easter Monday)

Boards

AQA 7172

Length of Course

5 half-day sessions

This course is board-specific for the AQA A level Philosophy specification (7172) and is for Year 12 students only.

The course will cover:

Epistemology

• What is knowledge? The distinction between acquaintance knowledge, ability knowledge and
  propositional knowledge; the nature of definition (including Linda Zagzebski) and how propositional
  knowledge may be analysed/defined; the tripartite view, issues and responses.
• Perception as a source of knowledge: Direct realism, indirect realism and Berkeley’s idealism.
• Reason as a source of knowledge: Innatism; The intuition and deduction thesis. Empiricist responses
  to these theories.
• The limits of knowledge: Particular nature of philosophical skepticism; the role/function of
  philosophical scepticism within epistemology; the distinction between local and global skepticism;
  Descartes’ sceptical arguments and issues/responses; reliabilism.

Moral philosophy

• Normative ethical theories: The meaning of good, bad, right, wrong within each of the three
  approaches: Utilitarianism, Kantian deontological ethics, Aristotelian virtue ethics.
• Meta-ethics: The origins of moral principles: reason, emotion/attitudes, or society; the distinction
  between cognitivism and non-cognitivism about ethical language; moral realism, including naturalism
  and non-naturalism; moral anti-realism, including error theory, emotivism and prescriptivism.
• Applied ethics: Applying the content of normative ethical theories and metaethics to the following
  issues: stealing; simulated killing (within computer games, plays, films etc); eating animals, telling lies.